19 Answers
19

Using Snow's Cholera map story. When John Snow mapped the Cholera outbreak in London, he noticed that most cholera cases appeared near certain water pumps. After these pumps were closed or cleared, the cholera outbreak stopped. This is how Mommy's/Daddy's work can help save the world!

In general, I always like to explain using images and vivid examples. A theoretical explanation is boring for an adult, not to mention a 11-years-old- child.

Kids often learn well through experiences, so I'd take them geocaching, and show them how the coordinates helped us find the cache. Afterward, I'd display the track in Google Earth or QGIS, and show them maps overlaid with our trail. Finally, we could calculate how high we climbed to reach the cache using a DEM, or display other data like rainfall to understand differences in plants growing along the hike.

This kind of depends on how much time you have. I think one of the best ways to explain this to anyone is create some layers on overhead projector slides .. alternatively on powerpoint of similar electronic slides system.

The base slide could be square blocks on a grid/semi-grid. On top of this you can then place the 'road' layer. Next you could place the houses layer, trees layer, etc ..now you have a map of your neighborhood.

The next step is to place a square grid over the top of all these layers with numbers running up both sides. The numbers don't have to be real geographic coordinates.

Now you can begin to explain how GIS is a way of looking at information. We have all these sets of information that on their own don't really tell us much. That by knowing where to place the information on the 'grid' we are able to combine the information to give us the big picture(demonstrate how a layer which is not placed in the correct position breaks the picture).

So you are explaining that GIS is the way we get all these layers of information and combine them to reveal the big picture.

I kind of assume here that you're talking to a group of children around the same age:

Explaining it to 15 and 16 year olds started with John Snow and Cholera (summary article on the Lancet) to keep them interested, before the standard "science of spatial relationships" bit. Couldn't tell you if that would work with 11 yr olds though...

Certainly Tobler's "Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things" might help. You could do an exercise on what suburbs the kids live in - those closer to where you are are more likely to live in the same suburb, those from further away not so much.

Finally you could talk about scale of boundaries - country vs property say.

I find people learn best from examples they care about. So if he likes skateboarding, maybe explain how GIS could be used to determine the best place to open a skate park: near neighborhoods with lots of kids, but in an industrial area with large empty buildings for space.

I recently gave a brief demo showing data that I got via satellites (imagery, landcover), terrain data (elevation and some derived surfaces), census data (roads only used for this). I displayed the data as it would look in my GIS software (talked for half a second about cleaning data and data prep) and as a layer stack.

This is all visually slightly interesting to kids..and I told them that our lab blah, blah, blah, used the data to find suitable habitat for species, model/compare data collected in the field to landscape layers, help understand how/how much pollution from watershed was entering the bay... but then I broke out the zombie factor. This was a big help: http://www.gonzaleztennant.org/2011/12/19/introducing-a-zombie-habitat-model/ (e.g., great ideas, zombie shuffle rate is 1.5 miles per hour)

Prior to the demo, I did a cost distance treatment with roads/pathways having one cost with landcover classes having other cost - the area of analysis of course included the building that the demo was in, and the outbreak was at the admin offices. I displayed the resulting zombie travel map over imagery in GIS software and I had the kids figure out how much time we had before the 'herd' reached us. Did we have to run immediately or could we grab supplies?

The link above has a more interactive/ students do the analysis bit - which would be great to try!

I use this explanation of GIS when I explain what I do to Adults as well as Children. I find it easier to explain using examples, but you often run the risk of getting oftrack and end up discussing the example itself, instead of the thing that you were illustrating, using the example as an metaphor.

Most of the Questions in life have some connection to Location. Questions like how do I get from this place to another? Or Who owns this land and just how much land do they own? Where else do they own this land? Till very recently, it was very difficult for computers to answer these questions, because firstly the information was not readily available, and when it was available, it was not present at one place. Even if it was present in the way we wanted, we often did not have fast enough computers which could answer solves these problems in a quick enough time span.

Let us come to an example. Suppose I want to build a mall in the city. I will first have to find out which land is available. If I find a suitable location, I might have to contact the people who own the area around that plot and inform them that construction activity will take place on this plot.

This kind of process is very easy for a person to imagine on a small scale, but gets very unmanageable on a large scale. GIS is a way at looking at these kinds of problems and solving them in the most efficient manner.

National Geographic have a good collection of learning tools that captives children and with interactive GIS games, this helps them understand geography and the environmental impacts humans have on our planet

A few years ago my oldest son was in 1st grade and they were learning about maps one week. I printed out a few things I had done like a fire escape map, a map to get folks from the airport to our office, and a aerial shot of their school. They loved it all and totally got into it. The one they could relate to the most was the fire escape plan map, as their classroom door had one on it. I told them to always look on the back of hotel room doors for those maps as well. My point: Relate it back to maps, relationships between locations, and how what we "do" helps you solve problems and they get it.

First comes the terms Geography and Information. Expected is that 11 years is enough to have a "basic" understanding of these terms.

Next simply show him a tourist map and point out how this map (a system) helps you glean information about the geography. How the museum is next to the park or how the super market can be reached using 1st street and also the 4th street.

You can also go on to pointing out how this park or museum resembles a square/polygon and roads are lines and how knowledge about the roads length can help estimate the travel time along it.

As an exercise you can encourage the child to sketch a map of the house or neighborhood and task him with accurate labeling etc.

Perhaps a not for an 11-year-old, but I'm partial to the Geospatial Revolution videos, which I was originally introduced to by my geography instructor. Be advised that some contain mildly disturbing images of warfare; you may want to preview before showing them to young children, although they're no worse than what is common on the news.

Its very good question and one can explain with the example..So I have explained one of school going friend.

Its like the Burger or Veg Sand-which contains various layers and one can remove layer at any time..like finger-chip its similar the network..similar fashion I was able to explain point layer and polygon layer with the example then he told me that he understands the concept : )